Sunday, November 11, 2007

On Veterans Day...

Historians when talking about the service of African Americans in the military have said time and time again, that Blacks served to prove their patriotism.

I bought this explanation of the history of African Americans military service until I thought about it more closely.

I asked myself, didn't African Americans have something to protect too? Didn't African Americans who served do so because they had families at home? African Americans have a way of life just like anyone else that we want to protect. And what of the hard fought and won rights that African Americans have in this country. Rights that many lost their lives fighting for here on U.S. soil. Weren't those rights worth fighting for?

It is condescending to suggest that the only reason that African Americans have chosen to serve in the United States military is because we wanted to prove our patriotism to Whites.

African Americans have served this country and lost their lives since the Revolutionary War. We continued that tradition in the Civil War. In that war we were defiantly fighting for our own rights.

African Americans have fought in every war this country has ever fought.

Obviously our service in the military has had its difficulties. The segregation that we faced previously in the military. Also the specter of seeing captured foreign troops treated better than us by the U.S. military. Most of us have read the stories about captured Nazi troops riding on the front of troop trains while serving Black soldiers were relegated to the back of the train.

Even today there are challenges. Recently an African American soldier named LaVena Johnson may have been murdered by a fellow soldier or soldiers and the U.S. Army refuses to investigate.

Muhammad Ali said when faced with serving in Viet Nam that, (paraphrasing) no Viet Cong had ever called him the N word, so why would he want to fight them. Muhammad Ali's stance shows that we were not mindlessly serving our country. That we thought long and hard about service and what it meant not just in the short term, but what it meant for us as a people and from a global perspective.

So as this Veterans Day is commemorated, I hope that we African Americans will remember the millions of Black men and women that have fought and sometimes lost their lives to protect the freedoms the WE have.

And that this country is worthy of protecting because our ancestors in very large part built this place called America.